In the following review, Phelps dismisses An American Tragedy as a second-rate novel, concluding "I cannot believe that this work, hampered by such clumsy composition, will be read in the next century."

And now let me tackle that two-handed engine of naturalism, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, where we follow the fortunes of a nincompoop from childhood to the chair. What A. E. Housman told in a page Mr. Dreiser tells in two volumes. Yet his steam-roller method gains, I suppose, by crushing out all this accumulated mass of detail. The style is clumsy and awkward; it has as much grace as an ichthyosaurus in a quagmire. But it is all true, unanswerably true. It is the naturalistic method of Zola. And if the novelist chooses to select from life a hero without brains...